Un diritto creato dai luoghi? Un’indagine sugli oggetti e sulla normatività delle rappresentazioni topo-cartografiche

The purpose of this contribution is to shed light on some dimensions of cartographic depictions, seen as normative drawings, that have so far been little explored: the peculiarity of topographic and cartographic representations and the way in which these representations are constructed. After introducing an operational definition of “map” and focusing attention on some essential characteristics, I analyze the surveying practices that depend on geodetic vertices, so-called “fiducial points”, boundary stones, and mesoscopic discontinuities. Subsequently, I try to highlight the problems related to the social ontology of topographic points and topographic maps, according to the lenses of weak realism and weak textualism. I state that mapping is a form of expression that is non-verbal but consistent with John R. Searle’s definition of language, based also on the materialization of topographic points in space. Finally, I raise three open questions about the relationship between topographic representations and constitutive rules.